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Thursday, June 25, 2009

Alfresco is the open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system that includes Document Management, Web Content Management, Collaboration, Records Management and Image Management. Alfresco costs up to 96% less than proprietary systems like Documentum, Open Text and SharePoint. It’s as simple to use as a shared drive or SharePoint and does not lock you in to a proprietary stack. As an enterprise solution I expected this to be a typical “community” edition, pushing a closed source version with additional features at a premium. Not so with Alfresco, the only difference being the level of support your receive from the team

Installing Alfresco is a breeze, with database setup and other configuration done for you after answering a few questions - I had my test setup running on a Windows 2003 Server in about 15 minutes. Dropping different types of document into folders (spaces) generates new content on the site, and when combined with rules, enables web publishers to use PDF’s directly as web content. They would appear at first glance to be going after the Microsoft Sharepoint market, however compared to commercial content management and portal offerings, Alfresco lacks advanced workflow tools.